Orkut’s Successor ‘Hello’ is Finally Available for Indian Users, Here’s What We Think

In August 2016, Orkut’s founder Orkut Büyükkökten came up with a new social network to connect people on the basis of similar interests, called ‘Hello’. The idea of this app was to connect people who share the same passion and interests.

When you sign-up on the app, you have to list down five interests, or ‘personas’, which will help you explore people with similar tastes. Your contact list and your preferences will decide what you see on your news feed, much like Instagram and Facebook. The algorithm searches for people with similar tastes and promotes them on your feed, also suggesting your friends you can add, called ‘potentials’.

Now, after almost 10 months, Hello is available to Indian users. At launch, the app was available in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, New Zealand and Brazil. India was supposed to be on the list for a more recent launch but the plans got delayed. Hello is now also available in India, Mexico, Spain and Puerto Rico.

Hello can be downloaded for both Android and iOS. On Android, the application is called ‘Hello.com’ and still says that it is unreleased, and it is an early access, the app may be unstable. It has a size of 21.92MB in the Google Play Store.

Initial thoughts of Hello app

As soon as your open the app, you are requested to sign-in or sign-up. When you click on sign-up, you will be directed to a page where you have to ‘pick your personas’ and choose any five basis your interests.

These interests range from animals to coffee, American Football to Bollywood and sports to modeling. When you select five personas, you’ll be prompted to click on ‘ready to go’. You can always change your personas later.

Upon proceeding, you will have to enter personal information like name, location, birth date and languages known. You also have to upload a photo for others to recognize you. Once you have filled the form, you can proceed to next page to enter your mobile number and password.

That’s it! You’re good to go. On the home page you will see your ‘news feed’ related to the interests you showed. You can toggle between your personas so that you see the posts of your choice. You can create communities basis interests and chat with people just like you would do on other social media.

Hello is still a half-baked product because all it does is bring people of same interest together. However, what it doesn’t do is find people around you who share the same interest. So if you’re interested in running, you will see posts from people who’re running 6000 miles away from you, maybe in the US or Mexico.

Again, if you join a community, you might see irrelevant posts and ones that actually don’t affect you in anyway. Maybe the founder could add location based posts and this social media could blow up like Orkut.

Hello might not become as famous as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter because of the massive size of these media. However, it might form a niche market of its own that caters to people who don’t want to be associated with one of these giants.